Midwest Food Photographer

I recently had the pleasure of photographing Dvin restaurant in Webster Groves, St. Louis. Dvin is a tiny family restaurant run by the mother/daughter team: mom cooks and daughter serves. The interior really feels like you’re having dinner in a Ukranian grandmother’s living room filled with Eastern European tsotchkes and knick-knacks. The exterior windows are obscured with lace and houseplants giving the place a closed appearance even when it’s open. It was definitely a challenge to photograph but I had a blast doing it. Read the Sauce review of Dvin then get out there and support a great family restaurant.

You can find the latest issue at Sauce at your newstand in St. Louis. If you’re not in the St. Louis area you can also get a subscription on their website, either in hardcopy or electronic.

I usually try to update my website every year or so to adapt for the way that my career and life has evolved. Last year when I updated jonathangayman.com I was more focused on marketing towards my corporate clients, but in the past year my work has started to slide more towards the food and lifestyle side. I had two main goals when putting together this site refresh: simplify the design for a more professional look that would really focus on the images, and to have an overall light theme rather than a dark one.

I have been using a combination of WordPress and PhotoShelter for years, but with this iteration of my site I decided to integrate PhotoShelter a lot more. I have been a PhotoShelter subscriber for several years, but I have never taken full advantage of the website features that they offer. WordPress is a great content management system for blogging, and while they have decent image management for the casual user, they just don’t have the kind of image heavy processing ability that I need. So I turned to PhotoShelter to handle 90% of the image galleries, portfolios and image distribution/sales.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did some work for Sauce Magazine, a culinary magazine here in St. Louis. While the majority of my work these days is corporate, I have been exploring food culture and photography over at my blog Shoot To Cook, and it is always exciting to get food assignments.

My assignments for the July Issue included The Boat House in Forest Park, a recipe ingredient’s shot, and the vegan banh mih at Sweet Art. If you haven’t been to Sweet Art you should totally check it out, and I have to say that the banh mi tastes just as good as it looks. I am a dedicated carnivore, but I have to admit that it is a fantastic sandwich and shouldn’t be missed.

You can find the latest issue at Sauce at your newstand in St. Louis. If you’re not in the St. Louis area you can also get a subscription on their website, either in hardcopy or electronic.

I love the taste of home made pasta. Like home made bread, it is hard to go back to the store bought kind once you’re used to making it at home. While home made pasta can be enjoyable, intense and delicious, making it can sometimes inspire madness (like a Fellini film). This short series of images approaches food photography from a dramatic angle in black and white.

Click on an image to view the gallery. Use the arrow keys to toggle through the images.